Japanese launch pushes PS4 to 6 million units in worldwide sales

Average PS4 owner has purchased 2.3 games so far.

As of March 2, Sony has sold over 6 million PlayStation 4 systems to consumers worldwide, the company announced Tuesday morning.

The latest milestone for Sony's new console was bolstered by 370,000 sales in Japan since the system launched there on February 22, the company said. That means Sony sold about 330,000 PS4 units in the rest of the world since February 8, when it announced 5.3 million worldwide sales.

With Japan included, Sony has been able to maintain roughly the same sales pace it saw in first weeks of the new year, when it sold roughly 1.1 million systems in the first 39 days of 2014. Leaving Japanese sales out, though, the rest of the world saw PS4 sales rates slow considerably from January to February, dropping from about 28,000 sales per day to about 15,000 in 48 other countries the system is available. PS4 sales in 2014 are understandably much slower than those seen in the holiday launch period, when the system sold about 89,000 systems daily through the end of 2013.

Sony also announced that it has sold more than 13.7 million PlayStation 4 games through both retail channels and its online PlayStation Store. That means the average PS4 owner has already bought 2.3 games for the system. That's slightly less than estimates for launch-era software sales ratios for the Wii and Xbox 360, but slightly ahead of similar estimates surrounding the PlayStation 3 launch. Killzone: Shadow Fall seems to be the best-selling single game on the system, with 2.1 million in worldwide sales, Sony said.

The PlayStation 4 is now likely in more households than Nintendo's Wii U, which had only sold 5.86 million units through the end of 2013, the last time Nintendo released official statistics. Microsoft has not updated its Xbox One sales numbers since announcing 3.9 million shipments through the end of 2013.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.